Chapter 274: Chapter 273.

Chapter 273. The Planetarium, Operation Hook Up: The Show. (1/5)

As students exited the coatroom, they walked by us and queued up in line to get into the planetarium entrance on the opposite side of the box office. The physics teacher was waiting for everyone there and checking people off on her list when they arrived to ensure everyone who’d come was accounted for.

When Izora exited the coatroom, she was followed by the student council president. The second he saw me, he sent a nasty glare my way. As for the two, it didn’t look like things were going very well for Zale. Izora had her arms crossed with a disinterested look on her face.

She’d done well to force Zale to chase after her. Izora came over to our side, sat down in the free chair to my right, and hugged my arm. She voiced a complaint, “Why do I have to participate in this game? This guy is such an unattractive bore. I’m not going to fall for him at all.”

“Haha, come on now. At least give this pitiful guy a chance at winning.”

“How’s he supposed to win when you’re his competition?”

As expected, Izora’s words cut deep into Zale’s pride and roused his overly competitive side. He grabbed her arm and pulled her up from the chair. 

“Are you being a sore loser now?” He wordlessly dragged Izora over to the back of the line without responding to her question.

When I saw his reaction, I couldn’t help but let out a sinister chuckle to myself. I stood up with Alicia and we headed over to the back of the line. We were directly behind Zale who’d firmly latched onto Izora’s hand with veins bulging on his arms and forehead.

Get mad. The madder you get, the better. 

The line between love and hate was a very thin one. This was another strategy I’d taught Izora in preparation for today.

Rather than trying to make him fall in love with her, she should get him to hate her first. She could manipulate that hatred and eventually convert it into love. Feelings could be transformed from one instant to the next. It’s a love-hate relationship. To hate something so much that you come to love it.

It was better to gamble on that possibility than sticking to her previous strategy of getting in his good books and growing closer. She’d made zero progress over the course of the last two to three years. This was a gamble. There’s no guarantee this strategy would work, but maintaining the status quo certainly hadn’t worked for her.

“Is this really okay? Zale looks like he hates her.” Alicia moved her lips close to my ear and whispered softly.

“Who knows?”

The teacher handed over all the tickets for entry into the planetarium for her students to the man working in the box office. When Izora and I got to the front with Alicia and Zale, we handed over our own tickets and were permitted entry.

When we entered the planetarium, the single brown cylindrical wall was dimly lit up by downward pointing yellow lights. Overhead, this planetarium had an eighteen-meter grey dome. 

The first thing that came into view immediately after entry was the eye-catching apparatus at the center of the room. It was shaped like a dumbbell with two spheres on the ends. There were many projector lenses embedded around the two spheres and body.

At the center of the rod between the spheres was a hollowed-out cylinder supported on the left and right by two v-shaped thin metal beams. The design allowed the dumbbell at the center to rotate and move into any position or angle. 

The double sphere design also allowed for the overlap of two separate full-scale projections on the dome overhead at once. 

If it was your first time here it was quite fresh and interesting, but as I’d been here before, it wasn’t nearly as impactful. Still, that didn’t mean I didn’t enjoy watching the stars. The only problem with this sort of venue was the number of shows they had. It was much more niche compared to movies you’d watch in cinemas.

There weren’t nearly as many people who produced unique shows intended to be viewed at planetariums. The market was much smaller for planetariums after all. There were around two hundred thousand cinemas in the world, while there were only about three thousand planetariums. It was honestly a shame because it was really a unique and immersive viewing experience.

If I were to put things into perspective, I’d estimate the market for planetariums as being anywhere from ten to a hundred times smaller than normal theatres.

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By that logic, if a new movie came to theatres every week, a new show would come to a planetarium like this one, once per season at best. Because of the lack of diversity in the shows they aired, getting frequent return customers was a difficult task.

As for why content creators veered away from planetariums, it was pretty obvious. A planetarium’s annual operating cost was a lot greater than a cinema’s. If a cinema was in the magnitude of tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands, a planetarium’s were in the millions.

To be able to break even through ticket sales which a creator might get a small chunk of change out of was unlikely. It would mean cranking up the price of a ticket significantly which just wasn’t possible. Nobody would buy overpriced tickets when they could just go watch a movie at a cinema. Thus, they were forced to sell tickets at a price comparable to a cinema’s.

But that wasn’t the only factor, another problem was the ratio of space used to seating.

This room had a capacity of about three hundred seats. If a single seat took up about 7.5 square feet in a cinema, they would require about 2250 square feet for three hundred seats. Going by the eighteen-meter diameter dome size, this room would work out to around 2750 square feet.

This planetarium also ran shows far less frequently than your typical movie theatre in a day to ensure they sold out as many seats as possible for each show. With all of this working against planetarium show production, it was obvious which avenue a content creator would pursue. 

Haaaaah. I’d gone from complaining about the profitability of the museum earlier today to complaining about how unprofitable the planetarium was as well. I really need to stop analyzing these pointless details. I’m not in university conducting a feasibility study.

God, I hated feasibility studies. They only ever crushed your hopes and dreams.

While I’d sunken into analyzing all these minor little details everybody had already seated themselves. Alicia and I ended up together with end seats. Zale and Izora were seated directly behind us.

By this point, the show had started, and everybody had reclined in their seats. The lights had all shut off so we could make out the entirety of the night sky projected onto the dome overhead. The scenery was much more pronounced than what you typically saw in the city at night. Normally, there was too much light pollution in the city to view the vast majority of stars.

You’d usually only see the brightest ones, but right now, we could even see the faintest dimly lit stars furthest away from Earth. There were so many it was impossible to count. Even planets like our neighbor Mars were visible right now. It was easy to find since it was a distinct fiery red color. 

It had become dark to the point it was impossible to see more than the vague shadowy outline of the people a seat’s distance in front or behind us.

“Hey,” Alicia abruptly interrupted my train of thought when she whispered directly into my right ear.

“What?” I turned toward her and asked, only to feel my lips come into contact with something warm and moist. Alicia’s right hand clutched onto my sleeve. Her left hand rose up and covered the side of her face to make it look like she was simply whispering something to me.

It was an unexpected surprise attack.

Right as we were transported to Mars, another world as the backdrop, I found myself kissing her here in the dark where we could barely make out each other’s face.

“Time to pay me back,” she whispered in a small gap where our lips parted.

Was this what she wanted as compensation for almost making her cry earlier?

I relaxed a bit then returned her kiss. Our tongues intertwined and our saliva mixed together.

I peaked over my right shoulder in the gap between our headrests and realized Zale’s head wasn't directed up at the dome, but rather, toward us. I knew he couldn’t see us very well, but he could definitely see our shadowy outlines stuck close together between the gap of the headrests and hear the sound we made as we kissed.

I could only imagine the enraged expression he had on his face right now.

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